Eurogamer.net - Lost Humanity 18- A Table of Doritos.Standards are important. They are hard to live up to, sure, but that's the point of them. The trouble with games journalism is that there are no standards. We expect to see Geoff Keighley sitting beside a table of s***. We expect to see the flurry of excitement when the GMAs get announced, instead of a chuckle and a roll of the eyes. We expect to see our games journos failing to get what journalistic integrity means. The brilliant writers, like John Walker for example, don't get the credit they deserve simply because they don't play the game. Indeed, John Walker gets told to get off his pedestal because he has high standards and is pointing out a worrying problem.

These are hard questions and they don’t have simple answers, but they’re important questions to ask.

John Walker's Electronic House - An Utter Disgrace.And what the above proves is not only just how moronic UK libel laws are, where someone can’t directly quote a person and then point out possible misinterpretations that could arise from it, but also how deftly our broken system can be used to silence not only discussion, but also criticism.

When a journalist feels they have been misrepresented, even if this so-called misrepresentation has arisen from their having been directly quoted, the response should not be to demand it be removed. The response is to offer to write a response column, or to publish a response in any of the public outlets to which they have access. To do anything else is to be an enemy of journalism, deliberately stifling discussion, and going out of one’s way to ensure further discussion is feared.

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They're doing an excellent job summarizing everything. This part is especially interesting:

in fact, bringing a libel case in the UK is prohibitively expensive and open to almost nobody as a result. And even if Intent had had a massive brainfail and tried it with this one, they'd have been laughed out of court in five minutes flat. Eurogamer's near-instant cave-in to the complaint is extremely baffling, as Wainwright didn't have a leg to stand on.

So Eurogamer caved for no reason, and it was already dubious for them to cave to begin with, as this isn't some big publisher threatening them. I could kind of understand them backing down if it was EA or Ubisoft going "hey, take that shit down or we're done with you." After all, they exist off their relations with big publishers. But that's not the case, it's just another media organization.

Way to stick up for your columnist there, Eurogamer.

My take on it? Eurogamer wanted to maintain the status quo at all costs, even if publishers didn't intervene. The status quo is, after all, so sweet, free swag and games and all that shit and a reporter reporting on the truth is too much of an inconvenience against the status quo.